ETHA: the biggest ether fund in America, and the yield it deliberately leaves on the table

What ETHA is

ETHA is a trust that holds ether and issues listed shares against it. It began trading on 24 July 2024, in the second wave of US crypto exchange-traded products, and it now holds $8.38bn as of 2 September 2026 — more than four times the next-largest spot ether fund. Mechanically it is the ether version of what BlackRock built for bitcoin: no derivatives, no active management, no attempt to beat anything, a fee deducted continuously from the holdings.

Ether funds differ from bitcoin funds in exactly one important way, and it is not the asset. Ether can be staked. Lock coins with a validator and the protocol pays a reward, currently in the low single digits annually. A bitcoin fund has no equivalent lever: bitcoin sitting in cold storage earns nothing and that is the end of the discussion. So every spot ether fund faces a decision no bitcoin fund faces, and how each one answered is the only thing that really distinguishes them. The whole field is laid out on our spot ether ETF list.

Scale, liquidity and the fee

At $8.38bn, ETHA holds a dominant share of the US spot ether category. Grayscale's ETHE, the renamed Ethereum Staking ETF, held $1.85bn; the Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF sits somewhere between $1.3bn and $2.17bn depending on which data source you trust — a discrepancy we have not been able to resolve, and which we would rather flag than paper over. Fidelity's FETH held $1.35bn. Everything else is under $300m.

That scale does the same work here that it does for IBIT in bitcoin: it is where the volume goes, so it is where the tightest quotes and the deepest institutional plumbing live. If you are trading size, ETHA is the venue.

The fee is where the argument gets less comfortable. ETHA charges 0.25%, and four funds undercut it meaningfully. Bitwise's ETHW and VanEck's ETHV charge 0.20%. Franklin's EZET is listed at 0.19%. Morgan Stanley's MSSE launched on 27 July 2026 at 0.14%, moving the ether fee floor below the Grayscale Mini's 0.15% — the same undercutting move Morgan Stanley made on the bitcoin side. And 21Shares' TETH has its fee waived entirely until 8 October 2026, though on a very small asset base and with the same waiver caveats that make HODL's expired waiver such a useful lesson.

Eleven basis points a year against MSSE is $110 per $100,000. For an investor holding for a decade and never trading, that is the dominant cost term and ETHA's liquidity advantage is worth very little. The trade-off is identical in shape to the one on the bitcoin side, which we set out with the arithmetic on the fee and spread page.

Scale

Why BlackRock deliberately did not add staking

This is the decision that defines ETHA. BlackRock could have amended the trust to stake its ether, which would have generated a return stream on top of the price and, handled well, made ETHA cheaper to own on a net basis than any competitor. It did not. ETHA remains an unstaked spot vehicle, and the reasons are worth understanding because they are the real risks of staking rather than the marketing version.

Slashing. A validator that misbehaves — double-signs, goes offline in the wrong way, is misconfigured by its operator — has ether confiscated by the protocol. That is a permanent loss of principal caused by an operational failure at a third party, and it has no analogue in a fund that simply holds coins.

Validator exit queues. Staked ether cannot be withdrawn on demand. Exiting the validator set takes time, and the time is not fixed — it depends on how many others are exiting simultaneously, which is exactly the moment you would want out. A fund that must deliver ether to authorised participants against redemptions cannot assume immediate access to a staked position.

Redemption liquidity. Follow the previous point through and you get the real constraint. A staked fund has to keep an unstaked buffer, manage the ratio actively, and accept that in stress it might have to meet redemptions from a shrinking free float. That changes the fund's risk profile in a way that has nothing to do with the price of ether.

Now add the governance point. ETHA had already grown to a multi-billion-dollar fund held by investors who bought a specific, simple product. Rewriting the terms of that product mid-life — introducing counterparty exposure to validator operators and a new mechanism for permanent principal loss — is a serious thing to do to people who did not ask for it. Building a second wrapper and letting investors choose is the more defensible route, even if it is more work.

ETHB: the staked sibling, and what it actually costs

The iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF trades under ETHB. It stakes between 70% and 95% of holdings through three named operators — Figment, Galaxy and Attestant — and it distributes 82% of gross staking rewards monthly, retaining 18%. The headline fee is the same 0.25% as ETHA, and there has been a promotional rate of 0.12% on the first $2.5bn for twelve months from launch, which carries the same expiry-clause caveat every waiver in this market carries.

The two funds now sit side by side on the same shelf from the same sponsor at the same headline price, doing structurally different things. That is a cleaner offer to investors than a single fund that quietly changed its own terms, and it is the arrangement we would expect other large issuers to copy. Whether ETHB's 18% revenue share proves competitive depends entirely on what the rest of the field settles on — 21Shares' TETH promises at least quarterly cash distributions on a 40–70% staked position, and Grayscale's ETHE has been paying rewards in cash monthly since early 2026.

The pending amendment, and what is not confirmed

BlackRock has filed an amendment that would permit staking inside ETHA itself. As of 2 September 2026 it is one of five staking amendments outstanding with the SEC — the others belong to Fidelity, Franklin, Invesco and VanEck. We have found no confirmation that any of the five has gone effective, and we are not going to imply otherwise. Filed is not approved, and approved is not live.

If ETHA's amendment does go effective, the calculus above changes materially: the largest ether fund would acquire a yield stream, and the case for holding ETHB as a separate product would need restating. It would also raise the governance question we described earlier, since existing holders would find the fund's risk profile altered underneath them. This is the single most consequential open item in the ether ETF category and it is worth checking the current filings rather than any secondary source, including this page, before acting on it.

How ether ETFs got approved, and the gap nobody expected

The SEC approved the exchange rule filings for spot ether products by 19b-4 order Release 34-100224 on 23 May 2024. Trading did not begin until late July. The gap was not a change of heart — it was that the individual funds' S-1 registration statements had not gone effective, and a fund cannot sell shares to the public until they do.

That two-month lag is a useful thing to carry around, because the same two-stage process governs everything since. The generic listing standards approved in September 2025 collapsed the exchange-rule half of the timeline dramatically, but S-1 effectiveness remains the gate, and it is the gate the five staking amendments are currently sitting behind. If you want the regulatory machinery explained properly, start with how these funds are actually built.

Who ETHA suits — and who it does not

ETHA is the right answer if you want ether exposure in a brokerage account or a retirement account, you value liquidity and the certainty that comes with the largest fund in a category, and you specifically do not want validator exposure. It is also the right answer for anyone who intends to trade rather than sit — the volume is here.

It is the wrong answer if you are a pure cost minimiser, where MSSE at 0.14% does the same job for eleven basis points less. It is the wrong answer if you want the staking yield, where ETHB, TETH or Grayscale's ETHE are the live options — with the important caveat that Grayscale charges 2.50% on ETHE, which swallows the reward several times over. And it is the wrong instrument entirely if you want ether you can actually use on-chain. If you are weighing this against bitcoin exposure rather than within ether, the crypto ETF picks page and the full list by asset class are the better starting points, and the buying guide works the same way for any of these tickers.